FATIMA AND HOPE

Pope Francis, Shepherd of Truth

MARY OUR MOTHER

We have a Mother! "So beautiful a Lady", as the seers of Fatima said to each other as they returned home on that blessed day of May 13 a hundred years ago.

GOD'S LIGHT OVERCOMES DARKNESS

Our Lady foretold, and warned us about, a way of life that is godless and indeed profanes God in His creatures. Such a life — frequently proposed and imposed— risks leading to hell. Mary came to remind us that God's light dwells within us and protects us ... According to the belief and experience of many pilgrims, ...Fatima is more than anything this mantle of Light that protects us, here as in almost no other place on earth.

LIVE IN HOPE

... We have a Mother, we have a Mother! Clinging to her like children, we live in the hope that rests on Jesus.

JESUS OUR HOPE

When Jesus ascended to heaven, He brought to the Heavenly Father our humanity ... Like an anchor, let us fix our hope on that humanity, seated in heaven at the right hand of the Father ... May this hope guide our lives! It is a hope that sustains us always, to our dying breath.

GIVING THANKS

Confirmed in this hope, we have gathered here to give thanks for the countless graces bestowed over these past hundred years. All of them passed beneath the mantle of light that Our Lady has spread over the four corners of the earth ...

PRAY WITH HOPE

... Let us pray to God with the hope that others will hear us; and let us speak to others with the certainty that God will help us.

BE A SOURCE OF HOPE

... God created us to be a source of hope for others, a true and attainable hope, in accordance with each person's state of life. In "asking" and "demanding" of each of us the fulfillment of the duties of our proper state (Letters of Sister Lucia, February 28, 1943), God effects a general mobilization against the indifference that chills the heart and worsens our myopia.

DON'T LET HOPE BE STILLBORN

We do not want to be a stillborn hope! Life can survive only because of the generosity of other lives.

LET THE LIGHT SHINE

With Mary's protection, may we be for our world sentinels of the dawn, contemplating the true face of Jesus the Savior, resplendent at Easter. Thus may we rediscover the young and beautiful face of the Church, which shines forth when she is missionary, welcoming, free, faithful, poor in means and rich in love.